Cat Driving a Car

Submission 31,468

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About

Cat Driving a Car refers to a video of a white cat turning a steering wheel in the driver's seat of a car. It became an exploitable greenscreen template on TikTok in mid-2023, most often paired with a TikTok sound of a song blasting through a car's speaker. The original video was posted by TikToker Shaina Culpepper (@culpepurrr) in early 2023, featuring her cat Louie.

Origin

On February 25th, 2023, TikToker^[1] @culpepurrr posted a video of her cat Louie driving a car, writing in text overlay, "Trying to find an address in 1994…" using music from James Bond. Over the course of six months, the video received roughly 4,000 plays and 630 likes (shown below).

Going into 2023, @culpepurrr gained increased engagement on similar TikToks^[2] of her cat Louie driving. She had also gone viral in 2022 for similar TikToks.^[3] Her engagement ultimately led to viral reposts of her February 25th TikTok^[1] shared by other accounts that cropped and mirrored it, centering on just Louie. The first known repost of this nature was posted by TikToker^[4] @canpolat____ on April 15th, 2023, gaining roughly 6.1 million plays and 821,300 likes in four months (shown below).

Spread

Going into 2023, users across social media started to reposted @canpolat____'s cropped TikTok^[4] for memetic content. For instance, on June 6th, 2023, Instagram^[5] user @catsdrip set the video to I Woke Up In a New Bugatti, gaining over 1 million likes in two months. On July 9th, 2023, X^[6] user @PunchingCat reposted the aforementioned video, captioning it, "hes taking his driver’s test," gaining roughly 46,000 likes in one month (shown below).

In August 2023, a greenscreen template of Louie the cat driving started spreading on TikTok. The first to appear on the app were posted on August 11th, 2023, such as TikToker^[7] @bubblesworlddd, whose video received roughly 2 million plays and 330,000 likes in five days (shown below, left). Another August 11th video was posted by TikToker^[8] @_mermaid_jazz, gaining roughly 236,000 plays and 22,600 likes in the same timeframe (shown below, right).